Dinner Time
by MidnightCereal
Summary: I suppose I should write something in this space that gives a general idea of what this particular one shot is actually about. It's important, I think, that I be concise and specific about its content. So, without further stalling or any kind of delay wh


Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Dinner Time, or That Other Title I Thought Was Better But Forgot It

By MidnightCereal

I could've waited for mom to call me downstairs, because she always did, but the food was always ready at that time, an empty plate next to my empty seat, both waiting to be filled. I wasn't hungry, really. In fact my stomach fluttered on the edges of nausea, but I knew that if I had to hear her voice without being ready for it...the disappointment in it...I'd really be sick.

So I crept down on my own, pain doggedly snapping at my red, swelling ankle with each even-numbered tread. The first floor of the house was dark save for the fingers of light that dusted the parquet foyer, streaming back and pooling to the kitchen like a frozen wave. Mom would be there in the center of clanking and bubbling things, metal and water and machines working on her schedule. Under her control. Mom was always under control.

I rounded the oak bullnose and limped toward the light, waiting for something in the darkness to snatch me before I reached that room and that seat and those eyes. Maybe I was hoping a little, too. Because I would see an elbow or an ankle, the swishing ponytail-end of mom's red hair, and with each flash of her my heart would freeze a little. And I hated it.

The feeling that overcame you, when you looked at her, looked long and hard until she chose to acknowledge you, was of your smallness. Of your complete and utter insignificance. It wasn't her fault that you were beneath her. She was better than you, and it wasn't arrogance on her part, or inferiority on yours, just God's law chiseled into that beautiful granite mask.

You felt something cover _your_ face. _Schandmaske._ I had looked it up the day I had own-goaled my squad with a brilliantly-executed header. Yes, I was shame. I was the donkey born unto Pegasus…well, Pegasus' sister. And I was German. Well, half-German, anyway.

Unfortunately, my anxiety-fueled overtures to trolls, witches and anthropomorphic cross-dressing wolves went cruelly unheeded, and I made it to the kitchen safe and sound. How long that would last, however…

"Sit down."

She had been switching off the blue flicker of a front burner. I had been watching her back and opening my dry mouth, which had been racing to produce sounds before my mind clogged it with phrenic waste, like it always did. Before mom could talk and crush me. I had been too late; she had known that I was there even with her back turned-

"_Vinson_."

And now I had made her repeat herself.

Even with the heat from the lights, the fire and cooked food, the room seemed to cool. Mom was the sun and a charcoal thunderhead drifted between us.

I hobbled meekly to the table in our smallish dining room, hoping the cold fire at the base of my skull was from landing on my head at the game today, which may sound exceedingly self-loathing. But that's more humane than my mother's mismatched eyes marking me, judging even the hitch in my broken step. Like she was waiting for me to run while I instead stumbled and flailed in the mud.

I hoisted myself into the slick seat, staring down into the empty ceramic dish. My reflection was haloed by a crescent of light hooked into the impression of the glazed white saucer. It was so clean because I had washed it myself, today, before my ankle had turned angry and stiff, right after we got home from the game. When I decided that I was going to make up for embarrassing her…

"_Go take a bath_." That was all she had said.

So I had taken a bath. She had washed the rice, cleaned the chicken, and boiled the water by herself, and I had helped by marinating in self pity. Mom had finished cooking and now I was clean and scared; there was not even dirt between me and her when she came in.

The panic racing through my small body began singing in a deranged, high-pitched howl, and it almost seeped out in a whimper. Almost. I was waiting for her to do something, _say_ something, to look up from the steamer she had laid on top of a singed oven mitt. But after she placed it on the table she turned and went back for another food item.

Mom came in again, this time with some baked chicken legs and thighs -she always kept the wings for herself- and again I steeled myself for the moment her baby doll eyelids flipped up. She silently leaned over me, close enough that I made out the sickly white skin striped along her right arm, a bleached trickling down to the webbing between her fingers.

"_Mommy was a soldier, Vince…"_

She put the chicken on the table and went back for the mushroom casserole.

But even the thought itself of mom cooking struck me odd. Instinctively, I knew it was very much like a lion trying to eat a salad. It was beneath her, in the same way driving her own car, flying coach, paying for expanded basic cable or having to take care of a child was beneath her.

Yet here I was. Was I her moment of weakness? Is this how she's paying for it? Did I wash my hands?

"Yes…" I chanced a lie so she wouldn't have to suffer through watching her progeny limp around like a disease-stricken foal, again.

I was served. I didn't blame her for not trusting me even with a large spoon, not after today. Rebel grains of rice rolled down and over the heaping white clumps of the stuff, and next to it was a steaming pile of sautéed mushrooms, and parsley leaves jutting out from the white cream like the hands of mudslide victims. Mom picked out a quarter of seared, mutilated bird meat.

Maybe she gave me all of that food so she wouldn't have to hear me yipping for seconds. Or was it because she was testing me, expecting me to eat it all?

More importantly, had I always been such a morbid, unhappy child?

Mom rounded the dark wood table, pulling at her blue buttoned top as she seated herself opposite of me. I wondered why we bothered to even have four seats. She was a respected woman in the neighborhood, as any upstanding single mother teaching at the local university and apparently accomplished martial artist (she _really_ hurt those guys) would be.

Respect, however, did not equate to popularity. If this bothered mom, it didn't show in her face or her voice or her…well, she never really smiled. The most you could hope to get out of her was a lippy smirk, and it was left to interpretation whether she was laughing with or _at_ you. Hn. Maybe that was why hardly anyone visited her.

Mom didn't smile. And…and that was that.

That was _now_. I prayed that she would scoot over and sit at one of the table's adjacent ends, not because I wanted to be closer to her, but because at least I wouldn't have to literally face her. Appropriately enough, I began to pray.

"What're you doing?"

The razor edge of her voice cut through my interlocked hands. I looked up, startled, and this is where I screwed up.

She was looking at me, and I stupidly looked back. No, no, you just couldn't do that. It wasn't the same as staring down some other skinny punk that challenged your preference in lunch box iconography. It wasn't holding your ground when the girl that you pretended to hate blinked her large brown eyes at you and flashed a secret smile.

It was never one-on-one with mom. Never. You were, at the very least, staring at two people. One saw you with royal blue purity. I look back on it, and I think of an ideal that remained true to itself despite the fires of torment, of endless war, rich and untouched like a photograph that reminded of what mom was meant to be…if it weren't, of course, for all of the things that had tarnished the other eye.

It blinked its faded lavender hue at me. All of those terrible petrified things penetrated me despite their grotesque rigor. This person too was stuck, perhaps frozen on the day the color fled from my mother's eye.

"_Mommy was a soldier, Vince…"_

I don't think she was either person. And if she was a mix, it wasn't a very good one. I had the thought, at that moment, that mom couldn't smile because she didn't know how to reconcile those two petrified people-

"Vinson, I asked you a question."

Why yes, yes she did. "I was just…at Penny's house, they, Miss Ngoc blesses the food-"

"And are you at Penny's house? Is Miss Ngoc here?"

I swallowed because her eyes were the tightening screws of a blue vice. "No."

"Am _I_ Miss Ngoc?"

"No…"

"Then cut that nonsense out. Eat your food."

I couldn't do anything right, anything to make it better.

I dove into the hot meal to dispel the coldness I suddenly felt, shoveling heaps of jasmine rice and marinated mushrooms into my mouth. I stopped only to breathe, or arrange the meal on my plate for more efficient gluttony, ignoring mom ignoring me. And that all worked incredibly well.

And then I put the fork down to manhandle the chicken. I looked at the drumstick, at its seasoned, crispy skin, and all I could think about was how I got burned on the soccer field, today. Over and over and over again.

And over.

Being the weakest defender on the team wasn't a new thing to me. Missing tackles and getting beat down the sideline like a Persian rug weren't headline news, to me or to anyone else that had the candy-from-a-baby karma to play with me. Penalties in the box were expected. Our goalie was resigned to botched kick backs or the ball bending to the far post off of my misplaced chicken wing. Sometimes all of these things happened during the same game. During the same half. In a five-minute span. Plus I threw up sometimes. Summarily, everyone on the field was completely acquiescent in regards to me and my epic, gross incompetence.

Mom didn't get the memo.

It was the first time she had seen me play. I just knew in the heart that was punching my skinny ribs that it was going to be the last. I had _wanted_ it to be the last.

She had yelled.

Wait, no. No. Yelling was what people did when they had movie rental late fees and their buddy told them they had deposited Rocky Seven in the late night drop box at 10:01 in the morning. Or because while it was great to know that people with glaucoma could live full and active lives, Williams obviously had two feet inbounds _and_ had control before Carter shoved him out at the one.

But the…_sound_ that had come out of my mother, it hadn't been her voice. It had been saving itself for the moment I curled away from the penalty kick that had my face written all over it. I had looked into the stands, the gravity of her stare pulling my eyes to hers. Except it hadn't been mom's eyes, or her face.

That woman had been greater than a town in upstate New York. Or its small university, its PTA or its pee-wee soccer field. Greater than this declining superpower, greater than the world as it was. I thought I had just been dorking around a crabgrass pitch, when in reality I had been picking at the scales of a Leviathan. That had been the first and last time that she let me see it.

More would not be expected of me. _All_ was. Better was unacceptable. Best was for small thinkers with impotent, toothpick visions. She would not settle for less than _Greatest Ever_. Mom would not settle for _me_. So she screamed. And viciously stabbed the air with that rigid flesh saber while the other parents refused even to bat an admonishing eyelash, opting on just getting _far_ away. The referees did stare, but only in the way someone would stare at a white nova of fire mushrooming from the direction of New York City.

I had clearly heard one of them say, "Oh my God…"

Hn. Maybe that was why hardly anyone visited her.

A side note: this had been the exact moment I knew I liked little Penny Ngoc more than just a friend. Because if she had been there to see _The Emasculate Conception_, I would have…have…

"Vinson, are you choking?"

Wait a sec…hey, I _am_ choking. Except I didn't say that. Because I was choking.

She quickly rounded the chamfered wooden corners, but she was still mom, her clinical face unsullied by shivering, coiled concern. She slipped out of my field of vision as I gasped and sputtered. I had the absurd thought that this was a gift to her, that she could leave me to suffocate and extricate herself…

But hands with easy strength hooked beneath my armpits and lifted me out of my seat. I began to thrash.

"Relax, Vinson," she said behind me, all around me. "You'll make it worse."

Then I was going to make it worse. I wasn't like her. I was not in my thirties, I was never a soldier, I didn't know any martial arts or survival techniques. I was mortal and I cared about living or-

There was a sudden punching pressure on my abdomen, and I looked down when I lurched forward. Mom held me in place with those hands, interlocked like the bookends of boxcars.

"_Relax_."

When her coiled fists thrust in and up once more, something popped out of my throat like a champagne cork.

And as an added bonus to living, the mushroom that hated the idea of me oxygenating my blood glistened at my feet with inert malevolence. I eagerly reintroduced my small lungs to the wonderful world of respiration as mom plucked a quilted napkin from the holder.

She knelt down, and stayed there. "Vinson…" Everything in me clenched from her cool inflection, "have you seen your ankle?"

How could I have _not_ seen it? At that point I couldn't tell if my body was sending extra blood there to begin healing ligaments or attract a mate.

"Sit."

I twisted around slowly and plopped down. Mom started probing past the burning skin, but I didn't feel anything at first. My gaze impinged on her lustrous auburn crown, but much too unfocused to penetrate it. Rather, I was made aware of the question wriggling up to the light of consciousness. It would writhe in sickish ripples until I faced it.

"Are…" I nearly choked again on a glut of cowardice, "are you mad at me? Still?"

Her thumb brushed over a particularly tender spot, then back and again, sweeping over the skin like a sensor. It stopped, and pressed down.

"OW!"

"Dammit, Vince!" Her face snapped upward on her elastic neck. A flash of that perfect person again, that goddess. "It's probably sprained, why didn't you say anything?!"

For the same reason I couldn't say anything at that very moment. If she'd just stop looking at me like that, like no matter what I'd say it would _always_ be the wrong answer…

My mother got tired of watching me explain myself with silent, stuttering jibbers, so she stood. She left me alone again, and I heard the freezer crack open, the flutter of plastic. I felt a compression on my shallow chest as the conflagrant mass inside of me worked its way up my throat, and…and I was going to cry.

I had to dampen it, to stamp it out and swirl the smoldering embers before she found the water in my eyes and, and I didn't know _what_ she'd do.

I heard a blender.

Two minutes later she had returned with gladlock baggies of crushed ice and a beige roll of compression gauze. By then I had resolved myself to swallowing the adolescent grief that worked incessantly to rip away my last vestiges of control, and with it, any white dwarf hope I had of mom respecting me before I turned thirty-seven. But it was working so hard…

Why do you have to be strong or fast or smart at nine? Who was I competing against?

I had no answers, but if mom was willing to consign me to unmitigated failure status, they should all be indexed in her unyielding, discrepant gaze.

She looked up. "We're going to see Doctor Rodriguez, tomorrow." She looked back down. And that was it.

There had been nothing in her beautiful face as she sandwiched the puffy joint with her makeshift icepacks, as she secured her first aid with a strip of medical tape, as she began to wrap it. My lower lip quivered when the fire leapt up on the back of my tongue. Now there was nothing between it and the outside world, between the dwindling light of redemption and years of my mother's dark, damning look.

Oh my God. I was going to cry.

Something flung itself out from the scuttled hull of cohesive thought, desperate and suicidal.

Apologize. Which almost never made things better and it was years before I fully understood why that was. But the best that could happen would be her forgiving me, with a word or two dispelling the anguish that immolated my lungs and throat. I'd have the chance to get better, to make up for it.

At the worst…well, when I thought of it I wanted to cry.

I _was_ her son, wasn't I? Why else would she feed me? Put up with me?

But I was nothing like her. Did she know that? Was that why she had been so mad today? Was that why she had yelled?

Was that why she had been out of control? Why it was so wrong for me to say-

"Sorry…"

Exactly.

What?

And I had almost asked that, but moisture dripped onto my knee and shimmied down the bruised slope of my shin. It was too hot to be drops of melted ice water. It wasn't coming from me. I heard her let out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding, drawn out into a ragged venting of air.

Then she gently sobbed again.

This was impossible.

"Mom…?"

She stopped wrapping my ankle, didn't bother looking up, but found my dark red hair and ran her fingers through it. I wondered how much harder she would have cried if I had pulled back. "I'm sorry, Shinji…"

She meant me, but I never failed to wonder if she realized that I had two names. Whenever I broke a plate or slammed the car door, or God forbid, got a B, I was Shinji. And she called me that enough for me to know what he was. The day that I found out _who_, when I could shave and buy health insurance, I would find this Shinji, find him and break his nose.

"I didn't…" I stopped when her fingers receded to finish wrapping the temporary compress. "I didn't mean to embarrass you, today…"

That was the most I had said to her in all of this terrible day. This week. She was never an open, touching woman, or a warm person. I think long before I was capable of doing anything about it, she had set like a steel ingot.

I don't think there was anything she could have done, either. And nothing could've been gained by melting or breaking her, again.

I discovered as I grew into my studies, as I mastered them, that I wasn't so stupid, after all. I had been smart enough then to realize that was who she was, and it didn't mean that she loved me any less. Some people are just…hard. That was my mother, and I turned that knowledge to my advantage by savoring those rarified moments of pure, untarnished warmth.

Mom finished the wrapping, wiped the wetness from her eyes and looked up. Her fingers were still a little damp as her hands went to the side of my head like warm blinders, and she looked into me.

"Do you like to play soccer, Vince?"

"Yes."

"Do you _want_ to be a better soccer player, Vince?"

"Yes."

"Do you want me to help you be a better soccer player?"

"Yes."

She smiled.

We went to see Doctor Rodriguez the next day. First degree sprain. RICE, RICE, baby. Five weeks later I faced mom in the midfield of our community center's worn pitch. I asked her where she had copped the Bayern München jersey.

She smiled.

The next thing I remembered, I was staring at an unfamiliar ceiling.

And for some reason I was very, very good.

I helped with dinner that night.

End of Dinner Time

RICE refers to "rest, ice, compression, and elevate," a method for treating minor sprains.


End file.
